


The Streets of Laredo

by Jld71, ShadyB



Category: Looper (2012)
Genre: Character Death, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Rape/Non-con Elements, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 10:11:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13809033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jld71/pseuds/Jld71, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadyB/pseuds/ShadyB
Summary: It wasn’t until his best friend’s funeral that Kid Blue finally caught Abe’s attention.





	The Streets of Laredo

**The Streets of Laredo**

                Looper’s weren’t supposed to die young. 

                The whole point of a Looper was that they lived into the future, got in a good 30 years before death came to collect.                 Looper’s died as old men, shot down by their younger selves and tossed into an unmarked grave.  No funerals, no mourners lined up to see the body, no band playing low and slow. 

                Count on Hsia to screw things up. 

                Looper or no, he’d managed to end up dead at 32, eaten away from the inside out by cancer. 

                His funeral was held on a bitter, cold January morning.  Outside the sky was gray, the earth brown, only just dusted with snow but frozen so hard there would be no burial, no graveside—the body was somewhere else, where it would be stored until spring.   The closed coffin at the front of the church was empty.  Hsia had been a bodybuilder since he was a teenager, proud of his ripped physique.  He hadn’t wanted people to remember him like he’d been at the end, nothing but skin and bones.  

Not to mention needle tracks. During the last months he’d been self-medicating.  Large doses of opiates had killed the pain, kept him functional and in the end, stopped his heart and breath.  There was a lot of speculation whether the fatal overdose was accidental or deliberate.  Not that it really mattered.  Either way, he’d had no more than a few weeks of life left. 

                Kid Blue was wearing the suit, the pure white three-piece suit Hsia had bought him that summer.   He’d spotted it in the window of Keane’s Department store, dragged Kid inside to try it on.  It fit perfectly, set his eyes off like stars.  Hsia had smoothed his hair down in front of the three-way mirror.   “Beautiful,” he’d said.  “You’re perfect.  You’re going to wear this to my funeral”

                “Black is for funerals,” Kid argued.  “Even I know that.”

                “Not in China.  White is the color of mourning, the color of death.” 

                “Like a white light.  You know, after you die you’re supposed to see a white light.  Right?  I saw something about that on TV.”

                “Yeah, sure,” Hsia had said, only half listening.  “I’m going to buy this for you.  Promise you’ll wear it to my funeral.”

                “Why are you talking about your funeral?  You’re not planning on dying anytime soon are you?”  Kid had asked.  He was only half joking.  He knew something was wrong.  Hsia had been losing weight for months, acting strangely-- dark and moody-- which was generally Kid’s jurisdiction. 

                Hsia’s hand was resting on the small of Kid’s back where he’d been smoothing the fabric of the jacket.  When Kid asked him about dying for just a moment, tightened into a fist clutching the smooth white wool, shaking slightly.  That was when Kid knew for sure that Hsia really was dying, that there really was going to be a funeral. 

                Abe, the crime boss they both worked for had come to the funeral.  He was surrounded, as always, by Gat men.  He was talking in an agitated, animated fashion to a pair of men Kid Blue had never seen before.  Big shots by the way they were dressed.  They wore shoes you couldn’t find at Keane’s Department Store.  Maybe they came from the future. It was a possibility.  As a Looper, Hsia had been one of the elite in Abe’s organization, at least on the local level, someone special, close to the power.  Kid was well aware that he was a lot lower down on the food chain-- small-time, a street level hoodlum just like he’d been his whole life.  He’d exchanged maybe half a dozen words with Abe in the 5 years he’d been in Kansas City. 

                “I don’t know what this means,” Abe was saying to the strangers.  “You say you’ve met him 30 years from now, that he was alive?  Well he sure as hell ain’t alive right now.  How am I supposed to know what it means?  Am I some kind of an expert in time travel?  I just drive my car; I don’t know how it runs.  I plug shit in and there’s electricity.  Don’t ask me where it comes from.” 

                “This has never happened before,” one of the strangers said.  “This isn’t supposed to happen.”

                “Well it’s sure as shit happened,” grumbled Abe.  Then he spotted Kid Blue.  “You, you were his buddy, right?  Did you know about this?  Did you know he was gonna die?”

                Yeah, Kid had known.  Five weeks after that night in Keane’s Department Store Hsia had actually told him about the cancer, mainly because the drugs had become impossible to ignore.  Kid couldn’t see tumors growing in his friend’s stomach and lungs but he couldn’t miss the fact that Hsia-- who hardly drank, had never touched drugs--  had started sticking a needle in his arm on a regular basis.  Soon enough he was chasing the strongest stuff available; Dilaudid, Oxy, Fentanyl.  Painkillers.  He was in pain because his organs were disintegrating, transforming into something else. 

                “When they cut my father open, his entire body was filled with little round white tumors.  They looked like pearls, like everything had turned to pearls,” Hsia told him.  The cancer ran in his family.  He’d watched his father die, that was why he wouldn’t get treatment.  Better to have it done in a year then hang on for five, he said. 

                He’d always been on Kid’s ass about drinking too much and taking drops but the cancer and the drugs changed him.  He was so desperate to have somebody be with him, to have some company on the path he was taking that he’d actually shoot Kid up with his stuff.  It was never as much as he used himself (high doses, taken with reckless abandon), just enough that Kid Blue could lie sprawled beside Hsia on the sofa for hours, lips slightly blue and feel death in the room, hovering over them.

                Abe grabbed his arm in a steel grip, shook him.

                “I asked you a question?  Did you know he was going to die?”

                “Yeah …”

                Abe smacked him hard in the back of the head.

                “You say ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir,’ not yeah.  Fucking animal.”

                “Yes, sir.” 

                “Well you should have told me, because now we’re facing a situation,” Abe was yelling in his face now.  “Your friend is dead in this reality and alive in the future I come from, which means that my future isn’t going to happen, which means that anything could happen which does not bode well for any of us …”

                “Lay off, Abe,” one of the strangers said.  “The boy’s upset, his friend just died.  He has no idea what you’re talking about.”  Kid opened his mouth to say he wasn’t upset, that he did understand (he didn’t).  Only then did he realize he was crying.

                Kid Blue had been born Ash Hansell of Creighton, Nebraska. 

Anyone in Knox County would tell you there never was a Hansell born who wasn’t as mean and low down as a rattlesnake and dumb as a box of rocks. The women were skanks; the men were scumbags, liars and thieves.  The whole lot of them were the dirtiest kind of trash.  He was mainly raised by his grandma (who was an un-grandmotherly 34 years old when he was born). His Ma was a junkie, hooked on hillbilly heroin and was in and out of Drug Court and rehabs and jails his whole life.  Who his father was, she wasn’t saying or didn’t even know.   Ash had serious behavior problems from the start.  He was prickly and sensitive and hopeless when it came to containing his emotions, especially anger.  Not surprisingly he left school in 8th grade, never having managed to learn to read or write and found his way into petty and not so petty crime.  By seventeen he was sentenced to a five to eight for armed robbery and sent off to the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

 That’s where he meant Hsia, when he was a little more than two years into his sentence. 

Since the day he’d arrived at Nebraska State, Ash Hansell was the exclusive property of Clem Stone, Nebraska’s most infamous serial killer. When Ash was very little, no more than five or six, Clem Stone was the boogey man on the local news, linked to half a dozen murders.  The only charges that ever stuck were one each of kidnapping and manslaughter for which the judge had given him fifty years. 

                At the time Ash’s sentence began, Stone was a tall, well-built man in his fifties with close cropped, graying dark blonde hair and a haunting, craggy face all sharp cheekbones and dark hallows. His most striking feature was his wide, clear and utterly penetrating dark brown eyes.  

                Not burdened with an abundance of emotions himself, Stone was interested in how others worked, what they felt.  Ash had a rawness that appealed to him, a certain lack of restraint.  He never had and never would master the art of self-control which Stone practiced so effortlessly.  Stone was fascinated by Ash’s rages and the tears of frustration he could be driven to.  For no other reason than to see what would happen, he set about breaking the young man (who he’d renamed Kid Blue) down through systematic rape and humiliation.  For the better part of two years, he alternated cruelty and brutality with a nearly romantic tenderness, taking on the roles of tormenter, father and lover and devil. 

His ministrations left Kid Blue a bundle of nerves, paranoid, and confused. He didn’t know if he hated or loved Stone, if he wanted to commit murder or suicide.  To most other --staff and fellow prisoners alike-- he was like a feral animal, too skittish to approach. 

The first time he met Hsia he was crying, crouched on the floor of an empty classroom, a line of blood flowing from his split lip onto his white t-shirt. Clem Stone had just finished with him and he was in that place, the one where anger got so strong it turned to frustration and tears.  He hated himself when he cried but he couldn’t control it.  Clem was petting his head and the back of his neck like he was a puppy dog when an Asian looking guy with large muscled arms and horn-rimmed glasses had come in.  They’d roped him into teaching some sort of literacy class, he was half an hour early.

“I’ll get right out of your way, Sir,” Clem Stone had said, polite as always. “Pay no mind to my young friend, he gets himself worked up.”

“Did he hurt you?” Hsia asked after Stone had left.

“No more’n usual,” Kid gasped.

Hsia sat on the floor next to him, helped him sit up.

“There’s a class coming up,” he said. “First one I’ve taught.  Want to stay on?  How well do you read?”

“Don’t.”

“Okay.” Then Hsia had started reading to him, reading out-loud from _The Wizard of Oz_.  Kid had heard of the movie but never of it being a book.  Somehow it sucked him in, made him forget everything.  He’d never thought of there being anything in a book.  Turned out there were whole other worlds in them, worlds that for a little while could become real, more real than Clem Stone or Nebraska State Penitentiary. From then on he was more or less hooked on Hsia.

Hsia was 6 years older than Kid. He came from San Francisco, where his family was Chinatown mafia (just how he ended up doing 8 months in Nebraska, he never said.)   He was smart, he knew so much but he carried his intelligence lightly, made things come alive.  And he was patient, like no one else Kid had ever met.  Woven deep into his nature was an inclination for helping other.   Living as he did, a life of crime and violence, he’d rarely had the opportunity to be of assistance.  Kid though, he needed all the help he could get.  Sullen, volatile, damaged 10 times to Sunday, there wasn’t enough kindness in the world to ease his anxieties.  Hsia was at least something.  Some glimmer of hope. 

It was Hsia who got the idea that they should go to Kansas City. He’d heard the town was wrapped up tight, under the thumb of a crime boss from the future.  The law, the police, doing time; none of that was an issue anymore. 

During those last few months in prison, Kansas City was the Land of Oz, the magic kingdom. There were even songs about it.  Of course Hsia knew them, would sing them to Kid. 

_I got to Kansas City on a Friday,_

_By Saturday I’d learned a thing or two._

_For up to then I didn’t have an idea,_

_Of what the modern world was coming to!_

Kid was enchanted, transported. He believed in Kansas City.  Especially when 3 weeks after Hsia finished his sentence, Kid was released early after serving only two years and 10 months.  They ditched parole and headed out together.  As promised, the law wasn’t an issue there.  Abe ran the city and he needed an army to do it.  Kid and Hsia enlisted. 

Hsia became a Looper, which was pretty important. Kid Blue was a more run of the mill gun for hire, but he was content.  It was steady work for good money, better than anything he’d ever hoped for.  They lived in a decent place, not a dump like he’d grown up in.  Wore nice clothes, they weren’t bums or deadbeats.  There was money for nice restaurants and going to bars and occasionally a woman.  Hsia dated a few girls though nothing took.  Kid stuck with whores.  He didn’t trust women.  He remembered how his mother and grandmother were always looking for a man to take care of them, trying to latch on.  Women seemed dangerous, parasitic. 

_Everything’s like a dream in Kansas City,_

_It’s better than a magic lantern show._

Once in a while he’d get a notion that he could be more, do more and be more important. Hsia tended to discourage him.

“Not in this town,” he’d say. “Not while Abe’s running the show.  You’re okay where you are, under his radar.”

“What’s wrong with Abe?”

“You don’t know what he’s like. He’s devious.  He plays with people, finds their weaknesses, uses them to his own ends.  Believe me, Ash; Abe makes Clem Stone look like Santa Claus.”

“That’ll never happen to me again.”

“I don’t think you’d be able to help it. Clem Stone picked you for a reason.  You’re not in control …”

“You act like I’m simple. I’m not simple.”

“I know you’re not. You’re just … not all there, when it comes to dealing with people.  You’re hot.  In this world you’ve got to be cool or people use it against you.”

Later, after he got sick, when he was on the way out Hsia told him, “Don’t hang around here after I’m gone.”

“What would I do?” Kid asked.  He was high, floating just outside of his body.  Everything was cold.  Times like this he really believed that they would die together, that he wouldn’t be going on alone. 

“Go straight, stop stealing and threatening people for a living. You could get a job.  Find a wife, have kids.  Lead a life like a real person.  Or go to San Francisco.  I’ll write my family about you, they have connections.  You can be a big shot there, just don’t stay here.  If you stick around, sooner or later you’ll get Abe’s attention and he will eat you alive.  Everything good about you, everything I love, he’ll take that away from you.”

Only Hsia died.

He worked right up to the end. His drug use had become an open secret among the Loopers.  They covered for him but things had reached the point where it was only a matter of time before Abe would call him in, fire his junkie ass.  All you had to do was look at him to know he was at death’s door.  He missed his last payday, just disappeared.  Two days later they found his body in a Knight’s Inn three miles from their apartment. 

He hadn’t wanted Kid to be the one to find him.

His affairs had been in order. His estranged family in San Francisco were to be notified but they had not claim to his body.  He’d made arrangements to be buried in Kansas City. 

Though the funeral took place four days after the body was found a small contingency made it from San Francisco. Abe chatted them up like a diplomat.  They had no idea who Kid was, though he was the only one besides them in white.

Hsia’s sister was there, she was a couple years older than him, maybe 35, pretty.   She looked kind.  Kid let himself fantasize for a minute that the two of them might fall in love, get married, that she’d take Hsia’s place in his life.  Then he remembered a rainy afternoon when he was six years old and his mother was tearing around a parking lot like a madwoman screaming at her then boyfriend, berating him for letting her dog get out of the car.  “You get your fat ass outta that car you stupid motherfucka and help me find little Sandy,” she’d shrilled.  “If that puppy gets hit I’ll rip ya dick off ya worthless piece a shit!”   

He had turned away from the sister after that. There was no way he’d willingly let a woman into his life. 

Now Abe was studying him, a combination of fascination and disgust on his features.

“How can you bawl like that?” He asked.  “Don’t you have any self-respect?  Shit, you’re gonna make yourself sick crying like that.”

“Leave him alone, Abe,” one of the suits said. “Now’s not the time or the place.”

“Seriously,” the other added, “we need to figure out what went wrong …”

“You go ahead,” Abe ordered them. “Do your thing, pace around, pull out your hair.  I’ll  catch up to you.  I’m going to see to this young man.”  He gave them a dismissive gesture.  The first man looked like he was about to protest but the other pulled him away. 

Abe took a firm hold of Kid’s arm.

“Come with me,” he commanded and lead him to a side door of the chapel. Behind it rose an unlighted stairwell.  Abe hustled Kid up it and down the hallway it opened onto, trying doors as he went. 

“Shit,” he muttered. “Something’s got to be unlocked.”

Finally a door gave. Some kind of Sunday School room behind it, a black upright piano against the wall, low tables, overstuffed bookcases, lots of pictures of Jesus.  Jesus knocking at a door.  Jesus standing in a field holding a lamb. Jesus in profile, head and shoulders.  Jesus surrounded by smiling boys and girls, their modern clothes in contrast to his robes. 

The piano seemed to draw Abe. He pushed Kid aside, sat down at the bench, started picking out notes. 

“How the fuck does that go?” He muttered to himself.  Eventually, he found his chords, “Got it.  This came into my head, seeing you in that suit.”  He began to sing as he played. 

_As I walked out in the streets of Laredo_

_As I walked out in Laredo one day_

_I spied a young cowboy, all wrapped in white linen_

_Wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay_

_I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy_

_These words he did speak as I slowly walked by_

_Come sit here beside me and hear my sad story_

_For I'm a young cowboy and know I must die_

Kid listened with rapt attention for the duration of the song, fascinated by this man who could pull a song out of nowhere; a song about sorrow and death, a song about him. This man seemed to understand him better than he understood himself. 

“Show me your arms.” Abe ordered, breaking the spell. 

“What?”

“I said show me your arms. Now.”  He stripped off Kid’s jacket, had his cuff unbuttoned and his sleeve rolled up before he really registered what was happening.  “Looks like you’ve been shooting up lately.  You a junkie like your dead friend?”

“No. He wasn’t.  He was just in pain.  Sometimes he gave me stuff, so he wouldn’t be alone.”

“That makes absolutely no fucking sense. From here on, you steer clear of that crap.  I’ve got no use for junkies.  I need my people concentrating on the business at hand, not where their next fix is coming from.  Understand?”

“Yes, Sir.” Kid stammered. 

Again, Abe looked at him intently, carefully.

“I have seen you around,” Abe said. “You’ve been around for a while.”

“Almost five years.”

“Your names Hansel. something like that. Right?”

“Hansell. Ash Hansell, Sir.”

“But the call you Kid Blue.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Because of those eyes. You’re the one with those eyes.”  His finger trailed over Kid’s eyelid.  “Like you could be an angel or a fucking maniac.  Either one.  Yeah, I’ve noticed you.”

“You have?”

“Course I have. A guy in my position, I’ve got to pay attention to the men around me.  Look inside them, notice things.  Two questions I’ve got to answer—does this man have a killer in them and if so can I control it?  I’ve been wanting to take a good look at you but your friend always got in my way.  Hsia was a good guy, I liked him but I don’t know how good a friend he was to you—shooting you full of poison, keeping you out of my sight.  There’s a lot I can do for a young man, if I see the right things in him.  I can bring him up in the organization; I can take care of him.  My Loopers, my Gat Men, they’re like sons to me. You ever had a father?”

“No, sir.”

“You can’t get anywhere in this world unless you’ve got someone expecting something from you. I expect a lot of my men but it makes them better than they ever could have been on their own.  They know they’re somebody, that they matter.  Are you anybody?  Do you matter?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t think so. I look in those eyes and I see a gun waiting to be fired.  I also see a little boy.  Which are you, which would you rather be?”

He’d been a little boy, hadn’t liked it very much. Only one answer made any kind of sense. 

“The gun,” he said.

“It’s got to be my gun, understand? No room for loose cannons in a well-run organization.  That’s the question, can you be my gun?”  He didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t want an answer, at least not in words.  “Come ‘re,” he said and embraced Kid, wrapped him up in a bear hug.  At first, Kid believed he was being consoled, comforted.  He wanted so badly to be comforted.  Then he realized that Abe was feeling him up, touching him.  That Abe’s hands were working over his body, fondling him through the suit, lingering over his chest and ass, his dick.  He pushed the intruding hand away from his groin.  Abe twisted his wrist until he yelped with pain.

“Behave, or I start breaking things.”

Kid’s chest tightened. He embrace had become suffocating, he couldn’t catch his breath, he willed himself not to panic, to bear it.  Hoped it was over when Abe sat on the piano bench again.  It wasn’t.

“Get on your knees,” Abe said, kicking at his legs. “On your knees.  Suck this.  Do it.  Come on, do it right.  God, do I have to do everything myself?”  He grabbed hold of Kid’s hair, dragged his head down forcing his dick down his throat until he gagged, moving him back and forth like a thing, some object he was using to jerk himself off.  This went on for some long minutes until he shoved Kid away.  “Stay down,” he ordered.  Kid hardly had a choice but to obey, he was a mess, retching and dry heaving, trying to catch his breath.  Abe knelt beside him, reaching around to undo his belt, yanking his pants down in back. 

“No. Don’t.  Not that.”

“Shut up, spread your legs. That’s good.”  Abe drove inside him, no lube except the spit on his dick, no preparation.  Hurt like hell.  Kid started to cry out but Abe clamped a hand over his mouth.  “Be a man, take it.  Show me you can take it.”

He took it. Swallowed the pain.  Different than with Clem Stone.  Clem Stone always kissed his breath away, got him aroused, hard.   Getting that sexual response, making him get off whether he wanted to or not, that was part of Stone’s games.  This was more like a physical bludgeoning, being pounded into submission.  Being claimed.  He was willing to be claimed.  Not because of the promises that he’d be somebody but because of the song.  Somewhere, underneath all the power and violence, somewhere under it all Abe understood him.  Abe was the father he’d never had.

Abe finished, pushed him away.

“Are you still sniveling?” He asked, buckling his belt.  “Pull yourself together; put your pants back on.  This is where we start.  Ground zero.  You’re a worthless piece of ass.  From here on out you prove to me you can be more than a worthless piece of ass.  I’m giving you that chance.  Don’t fuck it up.”

Kid got unsteadily to his feet.

“You’re shaky. When was the last time you ate?”  Abe asked.

He had no idea. The first couple days after Hsia died he’d throw up a lot, maybe from coming off the drugs.  Since then he’d had no appetite.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. Christ.  You’re going to be one who needs a lot of handholding, aren’t you?  I hope you’re worth the effort.  Come on, I’ve got shit to do.  The whole fucking space time continuum is out of whack thanks to your good buddy and his family heirloom cancer.  It’s gonna be a huge mess to sort out.”  He started to lead Kid out the door but paused to run a hand down his side.  “You do look amazing in the fucking suit,” he said.

“I got my golden ticket today,” Hsia had said the last time he saw him.

“What do you mean?” Kid asked.  He had just walked in, coming back home after work.  Hsia was waiting.  He had his works out, a bottle of whiskey already started.

“The guy I shot today had gold bouillon strapped to his back. Before I dumped the body I looked at his face.  It was me, I was old.  Older anyhow, I was in my 60’s.  I killed myself today, Ash.  Do you know what that means?”

“I got no clue.” He had poured a shot of whiskey, felt its burning heat fill the cold vault of his chest.  It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t change anything. 

“It means the future isn’t going to happen, not the way we think. It means that every time you or I turn left or right, a whole other future opens up.  There’s a future where a cell divided in me, a future where it didn’t.  Every choice opens up another possibility.  Anything is possible.  It’s magic, Kid, over the rainbow.  Death is the rainbow.  I’m not afraid anymore.”

“That’s good.” It was. 

It didn’t change anything, but it was good to know that someday, somehow there could be an end to fear. Over the rainbow.  Maybe Hsia still existed, maybe he could see.

“Bastard didn’t even wait until my funeral was over before he made his move,” Kid could almost hear him say.

“It’s not like that,” he muttered in reply. “He’s giving me a chance.”

“The kind of chance where the dice are loaded against you and the house always wins. A chance like that is no chance at all.”

“What else do I got?”

“I loved you, Ash. We loved each other.” 

“You’re gone, turned to pearls. I gotta go on, into the future.  Whatever that’s gonna be.”

“I understand,” Hsia said. “Tell me all about it when we see each other again.”


End file.
